1

The Claims of Theory

The main theme of these lectures will revolve around the

current debates on the nature of history, debates that are
especially active in the United States, but I must say at once
that I cannot claim to offer an exhaustive discussion. I
propose to home in on a selection of the arguments that are
at present running around, and I apologize from the start to
all the disputants whom I shall not be able to mention. I
should also like to make it plain from the start that I shall be
defending what may appear to be very old-fashioned con-
victions and practices. My views and attitudes were formed
by some forty-five years of trying to understand the his-
torical past and write about it, and in some people's eyes I
shall unquestionably appear ossified, even dead. However, I
can only preach what I believe, and I do believe in those
entrenched positions concerning the reality of historical
studies. Perhaps there is virtue in now and again tackling
the champions of innovation and new fashion from a position
of mere experience.
Where today shall we find the Queen of Sciences? In the
middle ages there was never any doubt. Theology, the study
of God's ways in his creation and outside it, took that place
by natural right. It subsumed all sorts of studies that have
since claimed autonomy: philosophy provided the means for
discovering God's will; history followed God's path through
past, present and future; the natural sciences expounded the
details of a universe operating by the law of God; and so
forth. But since the sixteenth century dethroned theology
we have witnessed a struggle for the succession. The sciences

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 4 The Cook Lectures

of nature and of man have developed in separate compart-

ments within which there has been much rivalry for
ascendancy. A hundred years ago, physics ruled the first and
history came close to winning the title for the second. The
experience of the past, properly and professionally studied,
was recognized as the best guide to an understanding of the
human condition. Other disciplines, it was agreed, could
usefully contribute but only insofar as they helped to an
understanding of the concrete reality of a past out of which
the present had grown and from which the future might be
cautiously prognosticated.
This claim on behalf of history never looked all that
convincing, and before long it began to be undermined. On
the one hand, the belief in a positivist history, capable of
being discovered and agreed beyond all risks of partiality,
retreated before various demonstrations that historians
intruded the uncertainties of their own personalities into
their apparently scientific work which thus came to be read
as no more than a collection of individual constructs.
History, some wiseacres explained, is only what this or that
historian liked to put out — a superior kind of fiction. On the
other hand, experience showed that historians did no better
than anyone else when it came to forecasting the future: if
this was so, what reliance could be placed in the idea that
their work on the past equipped them with a sound under-
standing of human nature and the circumstances within
which it operated? Once the overcharged claims of history
lost credibility, attacks on it could be mounted from all
sides. Some people held that there was a better sort of history
to be found than that practised by historians; others went
further and maintained that the less the present and future
had to do with the past the better for all concerned. Both
these lines of thought - if thought is the right word - have
cast up influential absurdities. Thus, for instance, the per-
fectly valid recognition that much conventional history
ignored parts of the tale it claimed to tell has deteriorated

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 The claims of theory 5

into raucous claims for a history of women which leaves out

men, or for a black history which deletes anything that does
not fit with preconceived convictions of black separateness
and indeed superiority. Past defects were to be remedied by
new defective emphases, not the most promising of recipes
to wave under the banner of truth. And the opinion that the
present requires no past to explain it has increasingly pro-
duced attitudes hostile to historical studies on the grounds
that they stand in the way of improvement. If only, so the
line runs, we were free of tradition we could build a good life
for everybody. Bile and innocence form a strange but power-
ful amalgam in this turning away from history. Not only is
Clio not the queen of sciences but to many she appears as
both a devil and a needless burden.
Now I think that these really extreme reactions against a
knowledge of the comprehensive past, though they certainly
exist, need not be treated so very seriously. This is an age of
rapidly changing fashions; yesterday's buzz words are today's
incomprehensible obscurities; who now remembers Marcuse
and McLuhan? And though an absurd fashion is sometimes
succeeded by a fashion even more absurd, generally speaking
the ship does manage to right itself. Why, newly trendy
historians are even heard to praise such things as diplomatic
history or historical narrative which rendered their trendy
predecessors apoplectic. Endeavours to escape from history
altogether regularly turn out to be neither possible nor very
sensible. The past is always with us and we are for ever part
of it — and not only yesterday's past but also that of the
retreating millennia; we cannot escape it, though we need
not suppose that it shapes us in some inescapable fashion. If
we try to ignore history or drive it from our minds we lose
our communal memory; and why should an amnesiac society
be any more satisfactory than a single person who cannot
recall who or what or where he is? Trying to live in ignor-
ance of the past does immense harm: every day's headlines
tell us so as we watch people devoid of any understanding of

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 6 The Cook Lectures

the scenes and organizations they confront, conduct policies

that are both childlike and childish. Like it or not, we live in
and with history, for which reason we must give thought to
the kind of history it is to be. The real threat to history as a
humane, useful and respectable exercise does not come from
the lunatic fringe; it operates right at the centre of the
historical enterprise itself. It arises from a mixture of dis-
satisfactions with the limitations of any study of the past and
of mistaken ideas about that study's proper function.
There are many and various attacks on what is called
old-fashioned history, but I shall confine myself to three
major issues, before in my third lecture turning to a positive
restatement of inherited wisdom. Two of those issues reflect
the overambitious dreams that afflict historians who do not
see why they should not be gurus, like everybody else; the
third springs from the mistaken demands of non-historians
trying to read history. The first two include the call upon
historians to formulate predictive laws based upon their
understanding of the past, as well as the conviction that
since history has to be written the only kind worth having
operates within the framework of a general theory of lan-
guage. The third I will call the fear of the demolished myth.
Between them, and sometimes with the best will in the
world, they undermine such claims to rational, independent
and impartial investigation as historians can put forward for
their work.
A good many people can see no virtue in history (except
perhaps mere enjoyment) unless knowledge of it offers
directly usable guidance to the present in its confrontation
with the future. As the phrase goes, they wish to learn from
history, a desire in which they have too often been encour-
aged by historians themselves. And they wish this learning
to be precise and reliable - like the lessons of science. For
them it is not enough to gain some understanding of how
people may act and react in given circumstances; they call for
behavioural laws to be extracted from an inspection of the

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 The claims of theory 7

past. They like such laws as that the repression of a sector of

society that is rising in wealth will lead to subversion and
revolution; or that the accumulation of armaments will lead
to war; or that only perfect democracy will ensure peaceful
relations within society; or that ideological differences will
always give way before economic interests (or the other way
round). We can certainly find historical examples to illus-
trate all such generalizations, as well as others to cast doubt.
The lawmakers insist that phrases of this sort, the product of
particular investigations, must have a normative function -
must precisely predict what will happen — and this is where
they go wrong. I remember once encountering the statement
that when people have exhausted the lands they live on they
will move to new lands: in effect that there is a law compell-
ing them to do so. But there is no such law, and they do not
always obey its nonexistent force. Generalizations based
upon a study of past events may be convincing or contrived;
what they can never be is a law of human behaviour. The
trouble is that historians cannot make predictions by virtue
of their science, though like anybody else they can try to
prophesy as human beings, with a barely better chance of
success than other people. They cannot claim powers of
prediction because the secret of their success as historians lies
in hindsight and argument backwards. Historians do not
even know what it is they wish to analyse and understand
until after it has happened; of necessity, they always reason
from the situation they study to its prehistory - from what is
to how it came about, not from what is to what may come of
it. Thus the hunt for predictive laws contradicts the very
essence of our enterprise; we leave such things to the social
scientists whose scientifically based ordinances find them-
selves regularly ignored by disobedient mankind.
Does this mean that the simple hope enshrined in the
phrase 'learning from history' is totally misplaced? It does
not, but the relationship between the teaching and the
learning differs a great deal from the simplicity so often

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 8 The Cook Lectures

imagined. A knowledge of history offers two uses to the

present. It equips the living with a much wider and deeper
acquaintance with the possibilities open to human thought
and action than people can ever gather from their own
limited experience, and it demonstrates the magnificent
unpredictability of what human beings may think and do.
History teaches a great deal about the existence of free will.
Of course, it demonstrates the effects of circumstances,
conditioning, inter-relationships, but it also demonstrates
that even when this scene-setting looks remarkably alike the
outcome can and will vary enormously because it arises not
from environment alone but from environment used by
human beings. If you incline to believe those who would
reduce humanity to the mere product of discoverable nature
and nurture, the study of history (provided it is free of
preconceptions) will soon disabuse you. There are no human
beings who do not feel the influence of the setting within
which they move, but all of them also transcend their setting
and in their turn affect it: what they do both within and to it
remains explicable but unpredictable. The call for predictive
laws thus deprives mankind of its humanity - of its power
for good and evil, its ability to think and choose, its chance
to triumph and to suffer. Whatever we may at times feel
like, we are not the helpless playthings of a fate reducible to
laws, and the variety of experiences inside the given settings
— a variety revealed by an open study of the past — shows that
this is so. Individuals do make history, a truth denied only
by those who would rather not be saddled with the responsi-
bility. For free will does imply a high degree of responsi-
bility: if history teaches that we are not just the products of
inescapable circumstance, it also denies us the comfort of
blaming laws of behaviour for our misdeeds and false
decisions.
However, if we are to absorb that very useful lesson - the
lesson that frees mind and spirit from the bondages that the
makers of laws are forever trying to impose upon us — we

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 The claims of theory 9

need to escape from the most insidious temptation hiding

within the very concept of learning from history. That
temptation lies in seeing history as essentially relevant to the
present; the technique which operates that temptation is
known as present-centred (sometimes presentist) history.
This is what Herbert Butterfield notoriously dubbed the
'whig interpretation': it selects from the past those details
that seem to take the story along to today's concerns and so
reconstructs the past by means of a sieve that discards what
the present and time-limited interest determine is irrele-
vant. The method is totally predictive: it produces the result
intended because it is designed to do so. The making of
convenient laws receives assistance from such simpli-
fications, but they assuredly ruin the real historical enter-
prise. Though as a fact of progress through time the present
has emerged from the past, it was not the task of the past to
create the present, any more than it is our function today to
set up a predictable future. If knowledge of the past is to
entitle the historian to speak to his own day, it must not be
so organized as to satisfy that day's whim; if it is to teach
usefully about mankind and the human condition, it must
be understood for itself and in all its variety, undetermined
by the predilections of the present and unruled by it at a
time when the present did not yet exist.
True, this call for an understanding of the past on its own
terms has some formidable implications for the working
historian confronted by an endless agglomeration of events,
of circumstances, of deeds and pronouncements and reflec-
tions. How is he to create some order out of such seeming
chaos, especially if he is to be barred from just constructing a
simple line terminating with today's outcome? The recogni-
tion of this difficulty has produced the first great threat to
unprejudiced historical study that I shall here consider: the
call for a general theory organizing the past. No sense, we
are told, can be made of the usual morass of historical
evidence unless it is fitted into a theoretical framework: it is

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 io The Cook Lectures

this framework, which exists independently of the historical

detail, that will create meaning for what without it remains
meaningless. Furthermore, so the argument runs, whether
the historian thinks he is using such a framework or not he
will inevitably be doing so as he selects his facts, makes his
connections, sees significance; and it is better to be conscious
of the theory employed rather than allow unrecognized
predilections to direct the operation. There is weight in this
argument: unconscious presuppositions have indeed done
much to distort the hunt for truth about the past. What
needs to be understood is the fact that recognizing one's
preconceptions should enable one to eliminate them, not to
surrender to them. However, the historian faces the for-
midable example of the social scientist who swears by
theory. The social sciences tend to arrive at their results by
setting up a theoretical model which they then profess to
validate or disprove by an 'experimental' application of
factual detail. The belief that it is only by such theories that
the historian can make sense of history is not new, but it
became dominant with the appearance of the French school
based on the journal Annales. That school deliberately re-
sorted to various theoretical models developed by such social
sciences as economics, sociology and social anthropology.
The result, we are assured, was to revolutionize the history
of France, especially by replacing interest in the evanescent
event by the extraction of the long-term structure - a neat
concept because it left so much uncontrolled speculation in
the hands of the historian. That influence spread after the
last World War when progressive thinkers more and more
took their inspiration from France, and in the United States
today very few historians even question the rightness of the
method. More especially they revere the name of Clifford
Geertz.
And yet it is wrong, and yet it threatens the virtue of
history. I am speaking, you will understand, of the great or
general theories, whether or not they can be represented by

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 The claims of theory 11

mathematical models - universal theories within which all

historical exposition is to be accommodated. There are, in
fact, two kinds of such theories with which historians have
been confronted: some are strictly ideological (they impose
an overarching interpretation on the past), while others are
philosophical and question the whole concept of the study of
the past. Today I shall try to deal with the former. Ideo-
logical theories have been around for a long time — general
interpretative schemes embodying a faith of universal valid-
ity, imposed upon the reconstruction of the past rather than
derived from it. And it does not matter whether the cham-
pions of the faith claim to base it on the study of the past,
because in actual fact the faith always precedes that study. In
my second lecture I shall turn to some current philosophical
schemes, namely the endeavours to use literary theory to
destroy the reality of the past as it had previously emerged
from a study of that past's relics.
Let us look at interpretative and ideological theory. It
does not matter which such theory we choose: they all arise
from the same ambition and all do equal harm to the
independent understanding of the past. At one time Arnold
Toynbee's circular model of the fortunes of civilizations
commanded much respect, except in Britain where the
prophet characteristically found little favour in his own
country. Much was claimed for this model. Allegedly it
opened a way out of the traditional historiography, preoccu-
pied with politics and personalities, given to an excessive
emphasis on Europe and its offsprings across the world, and
forgetful of the subterranean forces which, some believe,
really direct the fate of mankind. Thirty years ago, even
dynamite could not shift Toynbee-worship in some quarters;
indeed, the effective disappearance of what for a while was so
hot a fever in such a short time can reassure one about the
hard core of human reason. For from the first it should have
been obvious (as some of us said even then) that Toynbee's
theories rested on inspirational faith rather than serious

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 12 The Cook Lectures

study. He generalized partly from revelation and partly from

the history of ancient Greece, the only so-called civilization
that he had studied in the conventional way, and he consist-
ently introduced religion into his artificial constructs
because he was a mystic rather than a rationalist. His own
applications of his scheme, not to mention those of his
disciples, produced some remarkable absurdities which he
unrelentingly defended. Thus, because his cycles demanded
it, he called the seventeenth century an era of peace, even
though wars of all sorts occurred in just about every one of
its hundred years in just about every quarter of the globe. I
should have felt certain that Toynbee has by now ceased to
direct any historian's labours, if it were not for the recent
biography by William McNeill which tries to restore some
respectability to him as a thinker; in any case, his brief
ascendancy (mainly in America and West Germany) should
continue to act as a warning against theory-mongers.l
Thus fashions come and go. We have had history written
to the model of society as a depository of the universal myth
(a la Levi-Strauss) or of coded messages saying that all forms
of knowledge are only forms of power (Foucault); Benedetto
Croce and R. G. Collingwood told us that all historical
writing involved re-enactment in the historian's mind, a
specific which pleased the history of ideas, suddenly pro-
moted from the scullery to the drawing-room; a hundred
years ago, biological theorizing derived from Charles
Darwin saddled history with notions concerning evolution,
the social survival of the fittest, and doctrines of racial
superiority and inferiority. None of these theories wished to
undermine the writing of history; they thought they were
giving it shape and substance. Two things were common to
them all: they made possible the rapid construction of
imposing-looking edifices, and they told us much more
1
For a sober but devastatingly comprehensive critique of Toynbee, the
historian, see Pieter Geyl, Debates with Historians (Groningen, 1955),
91—178, and Encounters in History (London, 1963), 276—305.

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 The claims of theory 13

about the present within which their promoters worked than

about the past. Though most theory-mongers like to make
our flesh creep, none of them has ever quite matched the
apocalyptic visions of earlier ages with their theories. Thus
the sixteenth century extracted from the Bible and the
annals of sacred history the model of a true church distin-
guished by a continuous history of persecution, a church
whose final and triumphant emergence (shortly to be
expected) would signal the second coming and the end of the
world. The world has not yet ended, worse luck, but then
the characteristic of such major frameworks has always been
their remoteness from ascertainable facts about the past.
The important question must be whether these strictures
apply to what at present is the dominant theory - that theory
which the prophets of theory-based history really have in
mind in their instruction and propaganda. None of the
faiths I have just mentioned is totally dead, though you will
not find many working historians employing even the teach-
ing of Foucault, especially now that one of his early follow-
ers, Lawrence Stone, has declared that kind of history
defunct.2 Among theorists of history, none can at present
rival the Marxists for influence, particularly in the United
States, in a curious fashion the last bulwark of that faith,
seeing that both Russian and French historians display
increasing doubts about what not so long ago was never
questioned. It is too early to say what the collapse of
communism in Eastern Europe will do to the Marxist view of
history; so far, its chief effect has been a stunned silence
among usually rather talkative scholars. Marxism claims to
be the one theory of history which rests upon the empirical
study of historical problems, and it fulfils the first condition
demanded of all general theories by embodying a forecast of
future developments — a power to prophesy. Thus, wherever
one looks one can find a sizable amount of history being
2
Lawrence Stone, The Revival of Narrative', The Past and the Present
(London, 1981), ch. 3.

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 14 The Cook Lectures

written on the model of a progressive struggle between

classes moving onward by means of revolutions, a struggle
conditioned by the decisive influence of the economic sub-
structure to which all other human experiences form only
paraphenomena. People entertain ideas and beliefs only as
by-products of their place within the economy, and all
actions are designed either to advance or to prevent the
revolutionary movement upward of new classes. There are
some very obvious weaknesses about the Marxist framework
of history, not least the fact that its prophetic capacity has
misfired so very regularly. The class structure paradigm
populates this kind of history with some very crude and
artificial categories: feudalism, capitalism, socialism - the
original Marxist trinity - still dominate, here and there
slightly refined by sub-categories identifying earlier,
ascendant and declining states within them. None of this, of
course, describes at all precisely what we actually find in
history, but the practitioners of theory-based history are
always allowed a measure of Procrustean adjustment of the
facts of the past, so long as the stretching and clipping are
done within the framework set up by the theory. As the
history of the Christian churches has demonstrated over the
millennia, true faith excuses all lies.
Let me make my meaning plain. I am not denying that
this kind of history has made some gains. Thanks to Darwin,
we have learned better to understand the possible changes
produced by an exploitation of social advantages. Toynbee
may have helped to modify excessive materialism in our
reading of the past, and Collingwood has helped to keep past
people's own view of events before us. Marxist histori-
ography, especially during its era of creative impact, greatly
expanded the area of historians' concerns and helped illu-
mine stresses within society. The annalistes have helped to
break down some unnecessary barriers between the various
disciplines of the mind that try to understand the human
existence. You may think, as I do, that such gains (most

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 The claims of theory 15

visible where actual historical evidence is thinnest) could

quite well have come without surrender to overarching
theories, but it is a historical fact that they made their
impact as the result of such adoptions. The danger to true
history lies less in an occasional resort to illuminating
generalizations than in the belief that only within them can
the historian find salvation. That which first makes them
attractive in the end constitutes their threat: the very fact
that they offer a helpful instrument for clearing up the
muddle of the past quickly turns into a conviction that the
past must be reconstructed to coincide with the theory. For
theories clarify and enlighten by means of a murderously
circular process. Allowing a great theory to guide your steps
means putting together that history that will bear out the
theory. You quickly cease to be in control and become its
slave. The theory directs the selection of evidence and
infuses predestined meaning into it. All questions are so
framed as to produce support for the theory, and all answers
are predetermined by it. Historians captured by theory may
tell you that they test their constructs by empirical research,
but they do nothing of the sort; they use empirical research
to prove the truth of the framework, never to disprove it.
The reason is psychological: adoption of such a theory
involves an act of faith, and acts of faith cannot afford
convincing contradiction. One might think that historians
might employ theories selectively, using whatever seems
most likely to open up the secrets of the past without
developing addiction to any one of the ways proclaimed by
the theorists, but experience does not support so comforting
a notion. Election of any theory as the true structure of the
human past invariably means surrender to it. Universal
theories are hard task-masters and do not permit dissent
among their followers; indeed, they cannot afford to do so
because a free testing of their claims invariably reduces them
to dust.
Over the years, I have met the consequences of the

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 16 The Cook Lectures

theory-frozen mind in small ways and large. Thus at the

International Congress of Historical Sciences of i960, held
at Stockholm, I read a brief paper drawing attention to the
fact that general notions about social control in the hands of
Tudor government could not be confirmed by means of the
evidence alleged (mainly acts of Parliament) because the link
could not be established between the statutes and the
government as supposed makers of them. A Russian dele-
gate promptly got up and said he was baffled: surely every-
body knew that acts of Parliament in the sixteenth century
originated with governments known to be concerned to
promote capitalism. At another meeting of that Congress, at
San Francisco in 1975, the Russian delegation would not
allow the translation of a Russian contribution to be read out
because it had not been vetted by the faithful; it was
unfortunate that the translator turned out to be a historian
from Russia visiting the United States. And so it has gone
on for decades - theory-dominated barriers to free study and
communication. Just the other day, I read in the journal
called History Workshop (which announces itself as edited by a
socialist-feminist commune) an attempt to criticize the
eminent, though late, French Marxist historian Georges
Lefebvre, with a reply that made it plain that the great man
had been wrong but because of his standing in the move-
ment was not to be questioned.3
I will illustrate the dangers more fully from an example
which is particularly fair because it involves the very events
which formed the supposed empirical proof first employed in
Marxist claims to offer a comprehensive framework for the
understanding of history. Thereafter, the theory became
sacrosanct for the followers of the faith while the details
could legitimately be manhandled and misinterpreted so
long as the guide lines remained in place. I am talking of the
alleged change (by revolution) from feudalism to capitalism
3
See History Workshop 28 (1989), 83-110.

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 The claims of theory 17

which Marxism from the first identified in what it called the

bourgeois revolution in seventeenth-century England. It was
upon this paradigmatic example that the whole edifice of
history as the progressive struggle of classes was first erected.
This, of course, has made it imperative that its essence
should be preserved: if what happened in seventeenth-
century England did not demonstrate the triumph of a new
bourgeois class resting upon its new capitalist mode of
production and introducing a novel bourgeois ideology, the
supposedly faultless empirical foundation of the faith is
pitilessly exposed.
The interpretation in question originally read thus:
capitalist developments in sixteenth-century England pro-
moted the growth of an urban middle class (called the
bourgeoisie) who in the civil wars of the seventeenth century
overcame the earlier feudal economy based on land instead of
money. The middle class fought and destroyed an aristocra-
tic regime and thus secured the victory of capitalist prin-
ciples in the mode of production, with the urban preference
for trade and industry now dominating over what had been
an agrarian society consisting of landowners exploiting the
labours of a peasantry. In the process, the agrarian sector also
went capitalist. Peasants were depressed into landless
labourers, and landowners used their land solely as a source
of wealth where previously it had provided a definition of
status. Whereas in feudalism the classes had been inter-
dependent throughout the hierarchic layers, with social
benefits accruing to all participants, in capitalism the simple
cash nexus replaced a nexus of established personal relation-
ships. All this had been pioneered by the bourgeois classes of
the towns who dominated the House of Commons, and the
victory of a bourgeois Parliament over the feudal king
signalled the triumph of the revolution. That revolution's
ideology - epiphenomenal to the economic substructure -
was the extreme form of protestantism called puritanism; it
too triumphed in the revolution for which it had provided

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 18 The Cook Lectures

the driving force. The link between puritanism and capital-

ism has endured in various forms: it could be presented as
oppressive by the Marxists and beneficial by Max Weber,
and both were talking historical nonsense. Thus this single
example sufficed to prove the Marxist theory of history,
which then came to be applied, pretty rigorously, to all the
events of the past, from Periclean Athens to modern
Vietnam — and indeed to the future of mankind tod.
Thus this first pillar of the doctrine could not be allowed
to shiver since like all religions Marxism could not tolerate
an erosion of its articles of faith. Yet just about every detail
of the exposition I have just put before you has been pro-
gressively and comprehensively disproved. Land had been
treated as a simple source of wealth certainly since the
thirteenth century and probably from the beginning of time;
the feudal scene involved a manifest cash nexus. On the
other hand, insofar as land also constituted a measure of
social standing, it retained that position in England into the
later nineteenth century. Early-modern England, whose
social structure did not significantly alter in the course of the
seventeenth century, knew no sizable urban middle class;
ascendancy in wealth, political weight and social regard
remained with the aristocracy and gentry, based on land-
ownership; successful merchants and lawyers commonly
sought to invest their wealth in land and join the leading
sector of the community. Capitalist practices, so called, can
be discovered in any age, even as the personal relationships
of landowner and tenant farmer were still manifest in recent
times. Indeed, after the supposed bourgeois revolution the
country's aristocracy ruled more powerfully than before: the
eighteenth-century aristocracy enjoyed an independence of
the monarchy which its predecessors would have envied. The
notion that what emerged from the bourgeois revolution was
the rule of the House of Commons has become ever more
absurd in the light of research. Most spectacularly, the
whole structure of puritan religion, bearer of a revolutionary

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 The claims of theory 19

and ultimately democratic message, has crumbled into

nothing, to a point where now we are even excessively
reluctant to speak of English puritans at all. The famous
radicalism of the age, eagerly advertised by radicalized
historians who were hunting truly populist movements
behind the bourgeois leadership, has turned out to be the
product of doctrine backed by a massive overemphasis on the
inflammatory writings of a few individuals with a ready pen.
Has any of this dented the theory among those who first
used it to create a comprehensible order in the confusing
past? Of course not: adherents of theory do not allow facts to
disturb them but instead try to deride the whole notion that
there are facts independent of the observer. The Marxist
scheme, giving fresh substance to the whig interpretation
that preceded it, came very handy to one of the most
influential scholars working on that era, R. H. Tawney,
himself a Christian socialist and technically not a Marxist at
all. His writings laboured under two preoccupations: his
desire to put an end to capitalism in his own day, and a
Marxist-derived general theory of the transformation which
he thought had first created the order he hoped to help
abolish. Thus he suffered from present-centred demands and
theory-based explanations, and even his personal goodness
and magnificent prose could not overcome two such handi-
caps. Yet Tawney's misleading teaching about the rise of the
gentry as the new middle class, or about the capitalist
destruction of a socially harmonious medieval England, still
informs many a textbook, thirty years after its inadequacy
was first exposed. Let me emphasize that I am not trying to
equip early-modern England with a universal happiness
called forth by capitalist production; I find pro-capitalist
history as ridiculous as anti-capitalist. Both are crutches for
some current selfinterest, and neither has anything to do
with history as it should be properly studied and practised.
Nor do I wish to deny that the original Marxist explanation
was impressive, given the state of research; I would respect

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 20 The Cook Lectures

those who framed it if those who came to accept had shown a

willingness to allow better knowledge to affect their theses.
But once a man has subscribed to a general theory as the
correct way to pursue historical truth he seems to be com-
mitted to perverting the past. Some fifteen years ago, Law-
rence Stone, one of Tawney's most loyal disciples, produced
a book on the causes of the English revolution in which all
the exploded commonplaces about a revolutionary 'class',
the constitutional rebellion of the Parliament, and the revo-
lutionary creed of puritanism reappeared.4 Since it continues
to serve as a text for school students and undergraduates, the
principal theory of the book remains well entrenched despite
the much better understanding long since obtained.
One reason for the survival of the Marxist structure lies in
the immense productivity of Christopher Hill who unlike
those other scholars is an avowed believer in the faith. His
many books and articles, published over some thirty years,
have most ingeniously developed the orthodoxy in an
increasingly sophisticated adaptation of the unchanging
guide lines to an expanding knowledge of detail. His
impressive campaign not unnaturally created a highly
influential orthodoxy, expressly based on the Marxist theory
of history as a succession of conflicts between classes. But the
progress of Hill's own research imposed a most peculiar
development upon this universal explanation. It being axio-
matic that the revolution must be called bourgeois, it
became necessary to identify the social class which could be
seen to carry a bourgeois ideology and bourgeois commercial
practices into effect. The urban and mercantile class soon
proved inadequate to the task which thus devolved upon the
artisans of the towns and the yeomen of the countryside -
what Hill called 'the industrious sort'. This loose term had
at least the advantage of being current, in other senses,
4
Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529—1642
(London, 1972); see my review in Historical Journal 16 (1973),
205-8.

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 The claims of theory 21

during the seventeenth century which, after all, had never

heard of the bourgeois in England. However, the indus-
trious sort also proved unwilling to carry the burden of a
historic mission, and even Hill recognized that the puritans,
left in charge of the field, would be hard to convert into a
class. He therefore turned towards the unsuccessful revo-
lutionaries — the class of the underdog — whose radical
sectarianism with its allegedly democratic beliefs aimed to
revolutionize the world. Among them the so-called Ranters,
reportedly possessed of the wildest notions, were given pride
of place. Unhappily it has now been discovered that the
Ranters never existed as a sect with a following; the mouth-
ings of two or three fools were exploited by an enterprising
publisher looking for titillating material to sell to a salacious
readership. This discovery has produced a sort of supernova
effect within the Marxist camp, leaving in the end only a
black hole. One alleged class after another has let the
historian down.5
Hill is a serious historian who has done a great deal of
work, and he has had many students some of whom became
5
For Hill's work see especially The English Revolution (London, 1940);
Economic Problems of the Church from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long
Parliament (Oxford, 1956) (but see R. O'Day and F. Heal, eds.,
Princes and Paupers in the English Church 1500—1800 (London, 1981));
Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (London, 1964);
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford, 1965) (but see John
Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and
Education 1560—1640 (Cambridge, 1986)); God's Englishman: Oliver
Cromwell and the English Revolution (London, 1970); Milton and the
English Revolution (London, 1977); The World Turned Upside Down
(London, 1972); The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 (London,
1961). For the removal of the Ranters see J. C. Davis, Fear, Myth and
History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge, 1986); the
counter-attack on this by E. P. Thompson, in The London Review of
Books, was distinguished by ignorance and devotional bile. J. H.
Hexter, On Historians (London, 1979), 227-51, constitutes a per-
ceptive analysis of the faults in Hill's historical methods which have
enabled him to maintain his thesis.

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 22 The Cook Lectures

loyal followers. Why, then, have all those constructs col-

lapsed? Wedded to a comprehensive theory which depended
on the existence of social classes in conflict, he could not
admit that seventeenth-century England contained no
classes; its structure can be analysed in various ways - by
localities, by occupations, by wealth, by status — but never
by class. Wedded to the theory of genuine revolution, he
could not admit that even a civil war and the temporary
abolition of the monarchy did not necessarily bring about
such a revolution; but in fact, none had happened. The
theory directed the selection of the evidence all of which
came from writings, pamphlets, sermons and such-like, that
is from material of comment and not of the event. Selection
guided by theory produced the usual effect: support for an
answer worked out in advance, but an answer which the vast
masses of genuine evidence ignored by Hill have by stages
rendered untenable. However, the true believer cannot sur-
render his theory, and Hill's most recent statements con-
cerning the issues continue to proclaim the victory of a
bourgeois revolution. As I understand it, he now agrees that
the ends allegedly achieved cannot be identified as the
ambitions of a bourgeois sector and that indeed nothing to
be described as a bourgeois class in the Marxist sense existed
at the time. But, we are told, this does not entail the
disappearance of a bourgeois revolution, so long as the
outcome can be said to look like what the historian has from
the first labelled with that name.
You may think that I am spending too long over one
erring colleague, but I need to establish my case. I could at
length explore the effects of theory-worship upon other
Marxist historians of England - all highly intelligent, all in
command of a sizable following, all of them cocooned in
their fictions. Those who insist that historians should
operate by means of large interpretative theories do so on the
grounds that only theories will bring out the mechanisms
that govern the past and that therefore without theory the

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 The claims of theory 2 3

historian is a mere antiquary. In the case of Hill's revolution,

the mechanism, once discovered by theory-free study,
totally denied the theory, but the historian preserved the
theory by discarding its supposed role in opening the
meaning of the evidence. This sort of thing, much com-
moner than you may think, can happen only in countries
where historical research is not controlled by the state and
where therefore the theorist's history gets criticized and
demolished by historians working properly. Theorists
deceive themselves if they suppose that they would do that
work anyway: scholars who believe that they will abandon
their comprehensive theory if research invalidates it contra-
dict experience. Max Weber advanced his ideas linking
protestantism and capitalism as a working hypothesis; the
moment that was criticized it turned into a profound convic-
tion, the more firmly adhered to the more preposterous it
turned out to have been. It takes a mental revolution equal
to a spiritual conversion to separate a devotee from his
theory, and the chances are that that will happen only if
another theory stands by to catch the convert.
All these great historical theories enshrine forms of a
faith, a faith either explicitly or implicitly religious. Even as
Marxists adhere to the religion of the revolution of the class
struggle, even though they cannot uncover the conditions or
consequences called for by the doctrine, so current feminist
historians subscribe to a universal theory according to which
every improvement in the condition of males was achieved
by causing deterioration of conditions for females, though
only the crudest and most inadequate simplification of
history has ever been offered to underwrite this notion.6 The
lesson is plain, but it is also devastating: all forms of
religious belief threaten the historian's ability to think for
himself and to investigate the reality of the past. The
historian, it seems, if he values his integrity, must be a
6
Joan Kelly, Women, History, and Theory (Chicago, 1984).

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 24 The Cook Lectures

professional sceptic - a scholar who cannot accept anything

merely on the instruction of a faith. If in fact he (as many
do) believes in a real religion he is particularly at risk and
needs to be specially on his guard.
I am aware that I shall be accused of vile prejudice — of
denouncing Marxism because my taste in politics goes
counter to communism, and of denouncing faith because I
do not adhere to one. But I am also aware that this is not
true. If I warn you against religion it is because any student
of the sixteenth century knows what religion has done to the
historiography of that age, and if I attack the Marxist theory
of history it is because at present it forms the most influen-
tial, and therefore most damaging, of these doctrinal struc-
tures. I feel exactly the same way about the Christian theory
according to which history exemplifies the hand of God
leading mankind through tests and tribulations to the Last
Day. I am equally unhappy about the so-called progress
theory of history - a theory which by a highly tendentious
selection of the evidence demonstrates straight lines of bet-
terment, especially in constitutional freedoms, through the
ages - ending, predictably, in whatever English or
American practice receives most conventional praise. I am
not concerned to maul anything; I only wish to rescue the
study of history from being mauled by its molesters. True
practitioners must cultivate a respect for the past in its own
right and an open-minded scepticism towards all theories,
large and small, those of others and their own. If such
respect and scepticism are available only to those who tend
to agnosticism in religion and conservative views in politics,
so be it, but I have no reason to think that this is actually
true. Possibly a conservative temperament, willing to
accept life on earth as it is with all its imperfections, finds
such attitudes easier to achieve than does the progressive
temperament, ever anxious to promote changes that will
make things better. But even progressive and optimistic
historians can, if they try, avoid the pitfalls of the general

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 The claims of theory 25

theory which demands the service of acolytes. The will is all.

I repeat that the objections I have raised concern sup-
posedly comprehensive theories used in approaching and
ordering the evidence: previously constructed schemes
which guide the research ostensibly designed to test them.
The alternative to this is not, as we sometimes hear, a merely
mindless accumulation of detail; the alternative lies in par-
ticular explanatory schemes extracted by unpreconditioned
research and applicable to particular cases only. Such the-
ories are neither universal nor predictive, though they may
stimulate research into sufficiently similar cases. One funda-
mental difference lies in the fact that the second demands no
faith and leaves the possibility of abandonment open. Even
the mind that first framed it must remain open to calls for
revision, however pleased it was with the original expo-
sition. I speak with a certain amount of feeling. Some forty
years ago I thought that I had discovered a period in English
history - the 1530s - when certain people and certain
circumstances co-operated to produce a major transfor-
mation in the structure and purpose of the state. Unfortu-
nately I called it a Tudor Revolution', at first 'in Govern-
ment', but in due course in every aspect of public and many
aspects of private life (as for instance in the development of
language). I should have known better, for I meant no more
than drastic but also fundamental change. I did not realize
that 'revolution' is a term protected by patent rights held by
those for whom real revolutions, deserving of the name,
involve popular uprisings. Anyway, I then thought that I
had found a theory to organize the history of the sixteenth
century in particular and other surrounding periods in
general. Much work has been done since, by others as well as
by myself, and the original theory looks a bit frayed. I have
had to change my mind on quite a number of points, even if
I cannot yet see that those who deny the whole concept have
proved their case. But at least I was able to control the
theory rather than be controlled by it, nor have I tried to

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 26 The Cook Lectures

universalize it beyond the area where the evidence first made

me formulate it. The theory proved a useful and usable tool
of analysis which had been put together by the basic experi-
mental work — work done before the theory had been
thought of. That seems to me the correct relationship
between research and generalization in history, and I would
claim that my experience proves that it is entirely possible to
work thus and get valid results.
So much for the theories offered as necessary for the work
of historical reconstruction - the work of making structured
sense out of the chaos of detail. In my next lecture I propose
to turn to those who have come to conclude that there is no
road back to a truth of the past — to those, that is, who have
absorbed the apparently widespread conviction that certain
extravagances current among students of literature render all
forms of objective study impossible and therefore disable the
historian from ever achieving what for a long time now he
has stated to be his ambition. Ideological theories create
preconditioned convictions about the historical past; philo-
sophical theories deny that the historical past can ever be
reconstituted. The first undermine the historian's honesty,
the second his claims to existence.

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